Will We Elect the Stupid (and Stupidly Rich), or the Sane?

In saner times, we have known what to do with these people. Back in olden times — ten or twenty years ago — in the meritocracy that is America, where the idea was to elevate those who show the best of us to the world, we would likely have never known their names. Christine O'Donnell. Ken Buck. Tom Emmer. Joe Miller. Michele Bachmann. And maybe the purest expression of utter Tea Party ahistoricism and confusion, Sharron Angle, with her belief that Social Security violates the First Commandment, and that fluoride — yes, fluoride — remains a communist plot. But each of these candidates is so extreme, believing broadly that just about all taxation is confiscatory, that virtually any expenditure of public moneys is socialistic, and that anything notionally "collective" is Stalinist. But they don't even really know who Stalin is, because they don't really know anything. They represent the temporary collapse of the American meritocracy. They represent America in a blind panic. They represent the very worst of America, and, indeed, this list is in danger of becoming much worse by the New Year.

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Yes, in saner times, we have known what to do with these people. In the marketplace of ideas, they would sink like stones. But in these times, Sharron Angle raises an astonishing $14 million in the third quarter.

Fourteen million dollars.

Nevada has become the nationalized election that it was predicted to be, and The Politics Blog will be on-hand to cover it to the bitterest of ends. So desperate is the right-wing to rid the country of Harry Reid that it is bankrolling a candidate who much of the time seems to be unaware of her surroundings, and who struggles with communicating the most basic thoughts to the world, and who doesn't have even a high-school civics class grasp (which is the highest level of formal education I achieved) on the way the government of the United States was designed to work, and who believes in a panoply of harshly un-American things.

And yet, she is tied in her race to unseat the Senate Majority Leader, the highest-ranking and most influential Nevadan in history.

Fourteen million dollars in one quarter. Raised by a candidate who carries on like a mental patient.

We need to at last call this for what it is: This is America in retrograde, thoroughly engaged in a spasm of exaltation of the stupid and the mediocre. Now, there is a significant cohort of the population that recoils at this notion, and, led by its priestess Sarah Palin, calls this the viewpoint of an American "elite." Well, yes. We have always been called to greatness — we have always been exhorted to excellence. America is an elite nation, and it didn't get that way by being led by people who didn't know that Africa was a continent and not a country. We did not become the greatest power the world has ever known, the shining city on a hill, by being determinedly dumber than the generation that came before, by surrendering (for long) to our most vile nativist passions, or allowing ourselves to be led (for long) by the morons and the fearful. People who wander into each new day, misunderstanding it as thoroughly as they had the day before, did not make this country great. In fact, it is this kind of ignoramus that has always — always — been nothing but a drag on American progress.

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When Palin delivers her stock line — "We don't need a group of elites in Washington making decisions for us" — she has unwittingly described our federal system as designed by the fetishized Founders. Why, yes, we do need an elite — with authority conferred on it by the people, of course, but an elite nonetheless. Our system and our security and our complex world demand it. So you can stuff your complaints about "elites," Ms. Palin. Because your America isn't expanding, it's contracting. Your America shows a sour, stupified face to the world. You show the world the worst of America.

There are some people in the chattering classes who carry on about the inherent and inviolate wisdom of the American people. This is, to put it mildly, an unexamined and fallacious belief. A stupid and glib and pandering trope. Because the world is full of actual evidence to the contrary. As a people and over our history, we have gotten things wrong and wrong and wrong again before struggling to correct course. And it is in correcting course that we are geniuses. Therein lies our wisdom. But first, almost without exception, we get it wrong.

So for this seismic election that is upon us, the question is: How wrong will we get it? By making extremists their standard bearers in several crucial races, are the Republicans giving away seats that they would otherwise have easily won had they nominated someone sane? Or will we truly exalt the lunatic and the stupid this year and elect perhaps the most staggeringly ill-fit Congress ever?